UK riots: Mr Cameron has been handed a chance to mend this broken society

The Tories have strong ideas about social justice; the time is ripe to put
them into practice.

David Cameron speaking last weekPhoto: EPA

By Tim Montgomerie

8:43PM BST 13 Aug 2011

This time last week, the Prime Minister was in Italy. His deputy was in Spain. The Home Secretary was in Switzerland. You had to cross the Atlantic to find the Chancellor, in California, and the Mayor of London, in Canada.

Unfortunately, the Government seemed to be all over the place even before the holidays started. Without a compelling sense of mission, the Cameron and Clegg partnership has been defined by public spending cuts. Deficit reduction is not, however, a great or noble cause. It doesn’t fire the imagination or gird the loins. The result is a Government that is supported but not loved.

This is the backdrop to the drama of the riots. Mr Cameron returned home to take charge and it is clear from his interview with Matthew d’Ancona in this newspaper today that he understands that politics in Britain will now have to be different. He left a country focused on mending a broken economy; he returns to a country that has realised it has a broken society.

The riots are a national disaster, but they do provide David Cameron with an opportunity to define a great purpose for his premiership and his government. It’s a chance for him to return to the agenda with which he began his leadership, back in 2005; the repair of Britain’s broken society. Within hours of inheriting the Tory leadership from Michael Howard, six years ago, Mr Cameron was in east London, visiting a project working with disadvantaged black youths. With Iain Duncan Smith at his side, he announced the formation of a massive inquiry into the causes of poverty and the failure of post-war welfare policy.

Because of that work, he is in a very good position. He doesn’t need an inquiry, as Ed Miliband has suggested. Over the past decade, Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice has been immersed in these social issues and has produced many compelling recommendations for action. Only a fraction of the centre’s ideas have, so far, been embraced by

the Coalition. As Welfare Secretary, Duncan Smith is pursuing benefits reform but the centre’s work on early intervention, parenting, gang warfare, indebtedness and voluntary sector funding has been left to gather dust on a shelf.

Few people, though, will now disagree with the Prime Minister’s claim that large parts of Britain are broken, even sick – and the time has come to dust off that work. Over the past week we have witnessed the culmination of the liberal experiment. The experiment attested that two parents don’t matter; that welfare, rather than work, cures poverty; you tolerate “minor crime”; you turn a blind eye to celebrity drug use; you allow children to leave school without worthwhile skills; you say there’s no difference between right and wrong. Well now we’ve seen the results.

The modern Labour Party’s answer to every social question is to open the taxpayers’ cheque books. We’ve tested that world view to the point of destruction. The welfare state has never been bigger but nor have our social problems. Today’s historically high tax burden has forced parents to spend more and more hours outside the home, just to make ends meet.

The Left is always ready to attack hyper-capitalism for the ways in which it can erode community bonds, but it looks the other way when it comes to thinking

about the ways in which the hyper-state can devour social capital. Labour has become the most materialist and consumerist of Britain’s two largest parties. Whereas Big Society Conservatives are immersed in the importance of relationship-building, within families and within communities, it is the Left that constantly emphasises the right to personal fulfilment.

It reveres “lifestyle choices” as though the kind of home in which a child is raised is somehow equivalent to whether you get your weekly groceries from Morrisons or Asda. Any political movement that is relaxed about the structure of the family will produce the amoral youths that rioted last week.

So this is a political environment that could see David Cameron at his best. With Iain Duncan Smith covering the welfare brief, Michael Gove at education and Greg Clark just appointed to the vital role of regenerating Britain’s cities, the Tory leader has a team that can start putting things right.

But before he can prevent young people from embarking on the fast-track to crime, he must first re-establish his law-and-order credentials. For nearly a year he has played fast and loose with the Conservative Party’s reputation on crime. The greatest success of the John Major years was Michael Howard’s prisons policy. Howard knew that a large number of crimes were committed by a small number of people and that, if they were incarcerated, they couldn’t terrorise communities. Ken Clarke has tried to unpick this policy.

There’s also the Tory policy on police numbers. While it is intellectually correct that there is no simple relationship between police numbers and police impact, budget cuts are rejected by 71 per cent of the public. Cameron needs to toughen his justice policies dramatically. Getting rid of Clarke and replacing him with a hawk such as Chris Grayling would be a start. Many members of the public won’t trust the Government to be tough on the causes of crime until it has established it is tough on crime itself.

Once that task is completed, Cameron can embark on his social agenda. For the past year, the Prime Minister has often looked like the public spokesman for George Osborne’s government but he’s never seemed comfortable with the politics of austerity. The PM should allow his Chancellor to do more of the heavy lifting on economic policy and concentrate on putting social renewal at the heart of his premiership.

Cameron lives, breathes and embodies a love of family. His politics is all about social relationships. He is fascinated by education policy. This is his moment. A moment to embark on a crusade to ensure a child born in August 2011 doesn’t become the 16-year-old looter of 2027. That is, if Nick Clegg will let him.